Tibetan Buddhist Altar

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called Turning Adversity Into Felicity

Many people experience fear.  Confidence in your practice and confidence in your prayers to the guru, these things relax the mind and subdue fears.  So my suggestion is to practice in that way and to begin to cultivate the kind of confidence necessary to have the mind be more relaxed and calmer.  Everything about us, everything about our practice and everything about our lives in general tends to go better if the mind is not tense and tightly constricted.  If it is more spacious and relaxed, all of our perceptual processes, every aspect of our lives tends to go better.

We can take this understanding one step further. If in our lives we meet with a frightening obstacle—a health obstacle, an obstacle to our finances or to our living situation or something like that—our tendency, of course, is to tighten up and become tense and constricted.  Actually, you should know that when obstacles are rising, if our minds become tight and tense and constricted, the obstacles tend to rise with more venom, and to be much more difficult to handle.

In a way, if our minds are tense like that, it’s as though we are leaving ourselves open for obstacles to arise and bring all their friends with them.  It’s simply that when the mind is churned up it makes everything very fluid, and when obstacles are rising, that fluidity may not be the best thing.  That fluidity tends to make things ripen and catalyze very quickly.

The best thing to do instead, is to allow the mind to perceive the empty nature of all circumstances, to meditate on emptiness, and to see misfortune and fortune as being inherently the same in their nature.  That doesn’t mean you have to like misfortune as much as you like fortune.  Nobody likes it as much, and nobody feels that way.  But still, if you can begin to take steps towards meditating on the inherently empty nature of both phenomena, there is a lightness and a spaciousness that occurs within the mind that allows things to relax, that allows whatever obstacles that are arising to dissipate naturally.

When you begin to learn a little bit more about the nature of mind, you will come to understand that our perceptual process, our minds and the ego structure that reacts to any kind of fortune or misfortune—are all inherently empty in their nature.  As we begin to give rise to that awareness and meditate on that, the nature of experience actually begins to change.  Clearly, in times of great trouble many, many practitioners have found that if they avoid the temptation to say,  “Now I’m having problems, best I get busy trying to correct them,” and become more active, but instead, go more deeply into practice and actually rely on meditation as a solution, sometimes just backing off from the situation and relaxing the mind will cause the situation to arise much differently.  And that’s including, and even especially, physical sickness.

All sufferings have their roots in cause and effect, and most can be immediately traced to the way that we perceive and the way that we react.  Although it doesn’t seem like that when circumstances are really slapping us in the face, if we can sit quietly and meditate and have confidence in our practice, have confidence in the blessing of the Guru, have confidence in the blessings of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, then in this way many of the obstacles in our lives naturally begin to dissipate.  Many people have worked through tremendous personal obstacles by relying completely on their meditation, and they come out ever so much stronger.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo